One way of ensuring that your business will fail is to create store websites that are not easy to use or are not helpful. Customers shop online because they want to avoid the hassle of shopping in stores, and one of these hassles is dealing with merchandise that isn’t marked or doesn’t ring up like it should. If these customers can’t easily purchase things from your website, they will simply go to another online store and never return. To that end, you need to make certain your store website is easy to navigate, simple to use, and is very informative. Here are some tips to accomplish this:

• Don’t make users click needlessly. If you can put all the information on one page, do so—don’t make them click on several different pages.
• Make certain necessary information—price, size, availability, etc. is very easy to find. Putting this information in a different color font may be helpful.
• Streamline the check out process. For example, automatically fill in the shipping address based on the payment address information, but give users a way of changing this information if they want.

When you create your online store, one of the things you will most likely want to incorporate into your site is a shopping cart. However, it can be difficult to find the one cart out of all the shopping cart solutions that works best for you. There are a couple of ways you can solve this dilemma, however.

The first is to read up on online shopping cart solutions and learn how to do it yourself. You can find some free code and java scripts available on the web, and some web hosts even have their own shopping carts available for you to plug into your website. If you have a bit of HTML know-how, it won’t be too difficult to add a shopping cart.

On the other hand, if you’d rather not take the business risk of setting up a shopping cart system yourself (and since the system will handle your customer’s credit card number, you do want to be sure it’s working correctly), you can pay the extra and go with one of the more complete “idiot proof” systems. You might need to play with it and you’ll still need to integrate it into the payment gateway, but its still another viable option. I’m not crazy about the idea of hiring someone to do it for you and I explain why in “Start Up Mistakes“

The first time a small business owner gets their tax return, they may be in for a shock: they’ll almost always have to pay taxes! Why? Because they may not have set up estimated taxes. Many small business owners, especially those that provide services, work as independent contractors at first. This means no taxes are taken out of their pay checks. Many small business failures come from not being prepared for this. The payment a small business owner takes from the business is considered an advance on earnings, and most owners don’t take social security or other taxes out of these advances. What they need to do is set up quarterly estimated payments. These payments are deposits made to a specific bank account. At the end of the year, this account is used to pay any taxes owed. If you don’t have one of these accounts set up, a CPA can assist you in estimating what your taxes will be and help you prepare for tax season. Most would agree that it’s better to pay a little bit every three months than to be hit with a large tax bill at the end of the year.